AWS Cloud Infrastructure Improvement

Posted by Aleks Yenin

In this article we want to draw attention to some interesting announcements and releases of Amazon products. The main directions of Amazon are currentlythe following:

development of cloud enterprise functionality (for large and medium customers’ use)

open-source technology as Amazon services platform.

Here is a brief review of the main offered announcements.

Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS. This technology provides a 6-directed replication (two copies of the data) between the three AWS AZ (Availability Zones). The size of the database starts at 10 GB and can grow until it reaches 64 TB. Amazon Aurora is a fully-managed, MySQL-compatible, relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases and the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. The RDS Console shows additional information about each of instances available on a set of tabs:

Alarms and Events

Configuration Details

DB Cluster Details

The Console also includes some additional monitoring options for instances. The monitoring page is shown on the following screenshot:

Amazon Aurora was designed to provide you with a performance ratio price that is more than 4 times better than the one previously available. When you migrate your existing RDS for MySQL database to RDS for Amazon Aurora you are likely to find that you can achieve the same performance with a smaller database instance. Operations with this solution can be done by your company’s staff, or it is possible to hire a trained AWS specialist (engineer) for support.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) – service tools that allow you to create keys to encrypt data and manage keys at the management console. Using KMS also makes it possible to audit when and where specific keys were used. When properly used, AWS Key Management Service can even help to address lingering concerns about moving sensitive data to the cloud.

AWS Config – service that tracks changes in AWS-client resources (creation, deletion, changing properties) and changing relations between them. This new AWS service captures the initial state of your AWS resources (EC2 instances and related items to start, with others planned) and relationships between them, and then tracks creation, deletion, and property changes for analysis, visualization, and archiving. With Config, you get full visibility of the state of your AWS resources. You can watch them change over time, and you can view the full history of configuration changes for a resource. You can see connections between resources and determine how changing one of them could potentially affect the others. As with the previous tools, you can hire an AWS specialist for AWS infrastructure support.

AWS Config provides the users with ability to create and maintain an audit history of their environment. The logs offer invaluable help for security and compliance. AWS Config represents a natural extension further into this area.

AWS Config is available in limited preview form, and you can start using it today in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region.

With Config, you are charged based on the number of resources and configuration changes recorded for supported resources in your AWS account (Configuration Items).